I do not know what or where paradise is.
I just know I’ve always sought it
and it’s never been where I thought
it was going to be when I settled
here, there, everywhere. 

If I were there, I’d certainly stay there.
Rain, fire, earthquake, war.
I would own or rent or squat,
be loose and unhoused on the streets,
I would never leave.

Unless of course the place itself
shook me off like a flea from its coat…
I’d find another paradise then, or something 
close to it.  Declare it the same, name it
New Paradise.  Lie to myself

that I was ever certain of just what it was
until I’d found and lost it.  Every quest
requires a rediscovery; you’ve got to lose one
to win one, etc.  I’ve never known paradise
but I’m sure that this is how it is.

The television
in the other room
is showing a cartoon

and from it I can hear the screams
of angry and humiliated people,
sounding more real

than any news cast
would allow them to sound
if they were screaming something real.

Never mind living large.
Better to say we’re living loud.
Better to say we’re all cartoons.

Better to say slow down and shut down
a little.  Whoever wants us to live at full volume
is hoping we drown something else out — 

maybe a hum from the undermining, or a dull roar
from things collapsing one after the other.
A savagery beginning to bubble and burst.

I’m shutting that TV down.  I’m going outside
to see what’s hiding in plain sight,
living without having to be turned on.

If we hold hands we can go together.
Here’s the open palm — please take hold.
You don’t have to say a word.

A story begun.

A miniaturized tap dancer.
A resting camel.
An unsteady carousel.
Fingers, shellfish, bored gardeners.
In the longhouse converted from dwelling to storage, many loose feathers.

A stopping point: try to determine where this is happening.
A map:  somewhere near Barrington, Rhode Island.

A small war initiated between the principal actors — a socialite, a meteor.
There’s that tap dancer, struggling to understand her fate, her sudden strange deficiency.

An overarching question:
if it all means nothing, why  are these images occurring to you in this order at this moment?

The real woman shakes her dark hair after coming in from the storm.
She looks at you and says, “Are you done playing?”

Are you done playing?
You set the dancer on the camel in the longhouse.
You close the computer lid.

Yes, you say.  Yes, I am done playing,
although this felt so serious while it was happening
and it may continue for a while without me.
I may come back to learn things and find murders, rapes, pleasant evenings, calm mornings;
or there may be nothing to see when I return.
Maybe a tableau standing stock still.
Maybe crushed legs.
Maybe all will be dead

but in real life the real woman beckons
and in real life reminds me that in real life,
such tragedies happen all the time.

Out in the old neighborhood
something has gotten loose 
that resembles a sun-headed god

It just ran behind Morelli’s Market
which has been closed for twenty years
The rotten old building’s shining like bonfire

There are a lot of indigent gods these days
many of whom live off the scraps of blood sacrifice
Morelli’s had the best meat anywhere

so maybe the renegade’s got a taste 
for decades-old clotted sawdust
or wants to suck the dry butcher’s block

A polytheist might tell you there’s a rebirth here
An acolyte of such a god might demand you bow your head
I’m going to say it’s only a modestly big deal

I think the god is indeed inside the buliding 
With that face he’s likely a sky god and therefore 
almost certainly a male and vandalous god

so we have to get him out of there
before he burns the place down
Sky gods always seem to screw things up

So in I go with a goat on a chain and a bag
to slip over Sunface when he bends to suck the goat
(It’s a myth promulgated by the gods

that a god cannot be easily subdued)
Once we’ve got him
we take him to the river and drown him

his head sizzling the pond almost dry
as it sputters out to a coal then an ember
then a memory relic or theological curiosity

We leave him there on the bank on display
It’s safer than trying to bury him
Someone eventually always digs them up 

and they come phoenix-quick back to bug us again

After we’re done I go back to where Morelli’s was
When I was young this was my bright Saturday morning
Up early with Mom to buy meat

I loved to watch the blood pool
in the sawdust behind the counter 
until Mike Morelli swept it away 

Now it’s a prime place for these old gods to hide 
in the wreckage of past age full of red memory
I chase one out of here at least once a week

shining like bonfire
faces smeared
I almost regret the deaths of all those goats

Did you know,
my dear, that I
am a realist?  
I have no
beliefs, only work
from what I know
is real —

so when you seem so
ghostly, slipping around
as much through me as 
near me,

I find it hard to hold on.
I know I should just
stepm back and believe
but instead

I’m floating here staggered
by the possibility
that I am the ghost
in our love, and therefore
unworthy of myself.

When it comes, it comes slowly.
God didn’t send it.  It wasn’t sent at all.
It just comes, and when it comes, it comes slowly
on its own wisdom path.  

If asked, it will say, “I came to be here
because this path that opened
inexorably before me
brought me here.”

Mountains at the edge of the scenery
will nod almost too slowly to notice, and
the long hair of meadows
shall wave its assent.  The earth

will agree with it at once, once it
has arrived.  Then, as it serenely kills us,
we will be forced to accept
that some expertise pushed for this,

that even Wisdom itself seems bent
on using catastrophe to instruct,
and that we seem unable to learn.

Respectfully, I must submit
that I like
the arc of a unicorn’s shank
as it breaks out of me, seeking 
a virgin to play with…

I like the smell of the new moon,
that I like that you do not know what it is,
that I could tell you anything about it
and it might as well be true…also

I like the hammerless revolvers of old,
and the many iterations of the Luger pistol,
and the romance of easy utility that attaches 
to such awkward little bundles of death.

I like you.  Really, I do.  Something
about the way your hair shines in barroom light.
Something about the floor under your shining head.

I like puppies and kittens with no backstory to them
except that they are puppies and kittens and 
they have hybrid vigor and no provenance.  I like them
to run and jump and bite and claw at me before sleeping.
That’s it.  I like to see them sleeping after such playful violence.

I like you, really I do.  As much as a derringer.
As much as a commando raid.  As much as sweeping 
hormones and such aside for a moment, for in truth
you make my balls feel bigger than supplements,

bigger than found poems, found money,
and found family.  (Not real family, though;
they keep shrinking me.)  I like how your voice
just went up in pitch and volume and anxiety

just for me.  I like just for me.
I like the way just for me feels.